Don't distort Islam, faithful plead

Published 10:00 pm, Sunday, April 8, 2001

When Jeff Siddiqui speaks to community groups in Seattle, he sometimes shows them a World War II poster announcing the roundup of Japanese residents for internment.

On the back of the poster, he has pasted a newspaper clipping from a more recent crisis, the Gulf War of 1991.

The newspaper excerpt, from the Houston Chronicle, describes a 1987 plan drafted by the Immigration and Naturalization Service for the Vice President's Task Force on Terrorism.

The task force asked for a response to a hypothetical executive order directing the detention in the Louisiana countryside of a "target group" of foreign nationals from countries "known to support terrorism." The INS zeroed in on eight predominantly Muslim countries in the Middle East and North Africa.

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"That sent chills up my spine," Siddiqui said. To him, the parallel with the Japanese internment camps was obvious. "I was shocked," he said.

Siddiqui is a Muslim on a mission, and it has nothing to do with dynamiting Seattle landmarks, demolishing statues of the Buddha or suicide-bombing a U.S. warship. Which, in a way, is his point: Media and popular-culture portrayals of Muslims as religious fanatics bent on terrorism are hideous distortions that he says misrepresent the essence of a faith followed by 1.2 billion people worldwide.

"Muslims are the demons in fashion right now," Siddiqui said. "Anyone who can take a swipe at a Muslim gains points these days, whether it's a politician or a publication."

A native of Pakistan and a naturalized American citizen, Siddiqui lives in Lynnwood with his Christian wife and their two children. His business is selling real estate, but he also puts his energy into attacking what he sees as bigotry and prejudice, giving public speeches, writing guest opinion columns for newspapers or sending letters to the editor.

A recent Siddiqui letter to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer protested the use of an unrelated file photograph of a fire-damaged B.C. mosque to illustrate an article on terrorists finding refuge in Canada, published on the eve of the Ahmed Ressam terrorism conspiracy trial.

Siddiqui may be more outspoken than other Seattle-area Muslims, but he is hardly alone in feeling unfairly maligned.

"Horrible" is how Fara Nizamani characterizes the mainstream take on Islam. Nizamani, a member of the teacher-training faculty at City University in Renton, was raised a Presbyterian in a small town in Tennessee -- her maiden name is Baker -- and converted to Islam 15 years ago.

"It seems like we're made into the bad guys a lot of times," she said.

Another convert, Shyamma Brisebois of Seattle, who was christened Joyce by her Catholic parents in Brooklyn, N.Y., said: "They make it look like we're out to get everybody, like we're out to terrorize everybody -- which is ridiculous, because it means there are 1.2 billion people on this planet waiting to terrorize someone, which is absurd."

The truth, Muslims say, is that Islam preaches peace and tolerance.

"There is nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, I can find in the religion that says we are supposed to go off and kill innocent people in the name of religion," Nizamani said.

"Islam considers terrorism anathema," Siddiqui said. "Islam considers non-Muslims as people who, if they're in your land, you must tolerate them. Islam says you will leave them alone."

Siddiqui cites the Arabic term jihad to illustrate how the Western world misinterprets Islam. To Western ears, jihad can sound like a Muslim rallying cry for a holy war against the infidels, but Siddiqui said that's way off base.

"Jihad means 'struggle,'" he said. "In its basic concept, the concept that Islam preaches, jihad is mandatory for Muslims: jihad against sickness, jihad against hunger, jihad to increase your knowledge, jihad to rid the world of evil.

"If someone takes that word and says, 'We're going to commit jihad against any non-believers,' that's not Islam's problem."

But it can be a problem for believers in Islam, who may be tarred with the same brush that blackens violent Islamic extremists.

"Just because there is a group of people who are so desperate they go out and do something that is not right, to associate that with mainstream Muslims is not fair," said Salem Dada, a Muslim investment banker who lives in Newcastle.

Nizamani, Siddiqui and other Muslims say it is no more accurate to typify Islam by Ressam or Osama bin Laden, for example, than it is to typify Christianity by Hitler or Catholicism by IRA bombers in Northern Ireland.

But because the Islamic world is unfamiliar and exotic, Muslims are readily subject to guilt by association, said Salah Dandan, a Muslim who is a business development manager at Microsoft.

"It's very easy to pick on Muslims and Islam," he said.

Or as Siddiqui put it, "We are The Other."

Muslims, though, are becoming less the other and more we. While exact measures of the U.S. Muslim population are not available, it is, by all accounts, increasing.

The 2001 World Almanac estimates that there are 5.8 million Muslims in the United States, close to the size of the American Jewish community. In greater Seattle, the Muslim population boom is filling mosques to overflowing; some estimates say 40,000 Muslims live in the area.

All Muslims believe in the unity of God; in Mohammed, the seventh-century prophet who founded Islam, as the last divinely inspired prophet; and in the Quran as the record of his preaching.

But there is considerable diversity within their ranks. Some Muslims pray five times a day, others three. Dandan, like one in four Muslims worldwide, traces his ancestry to the religion's Arabic roots, but Siddiqui was born in Pakistan, Dada is an African-born Muslim of East Indian ethnicity and Brisebois and Nizamani are U.S.-born converts.

As their community grows in size and visibility, many Muslims hope they will become better understood and less subject to stereotyping.

"The more I interact, the more open I am about my religion and what I believe," Dandan said.